


It's Been A Long, Long Time

by TheElusiveBadger



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Not A Fix-It, Post-Endgame, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 17:35:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18596134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: They'd talked about it before hand. That didn't make the years any less hard.*Endgame Spoilers*





	It's Been A Long, Long Time

They’d talked about it, outside with the sun rising high in the sky while Sam fiddled with a French press and a kettle in the kitchen. They’d talked about it while Bucky skipped rocks across the lake, ripples forming perfect circular patterns in that way of his, and Steve thinks of the reflection of the rising sun on brown hair.

“It’s alright,” Bucky says without looking at him. It’s been _five_ years, and he hasn’t aged a day. “I understand.”

Steve tries to argue, tries to force the words past his tongue, tries to remember telling men at the VA meetings of tired, mourning souls that they needed to _move on_. Tries to remember she was happy, lived a good life, built S.H.I.E.L.D. from the ground up.

“I can—” he starts to say, but Bucky turns to look at him then with tired, blue eyes the same color as the lake.

He shakes his head. “No. Might fuck something else up.”

Bruce calls out to them then, telling them it’s _time_. Steve sighs, rubs his hand across his eyes, and watches as Bucky walks away from him.

One last time.

 

 

 

They get married in a church in England at Peggy’s mother’s insistence. No one can know, Steve tells her, and swallows down her questions and queries and endless awed looks. Far as she knows, he’s come out of the ice, untouched. He makes sure that Howard’s not there, because Howard _can’t stop looking for him in the ice_.

“I love you,” he tells her, and he means it with every ounce of his heart as he carries her across the threshold. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she replies with a laugh. There are flowers in her hair.

The next day, the lies hit. He swallows down the urge to break into S.H.I.E.L.D. To tell Peggy everything. About HYDRA.

About Bucky. Bucky, who’s being tortured. Whose mind is gone and taken over by everything that’s wrong with Earth. Bucky who’s trapped in the ice somewhere, too, and he’s not sleeping peacefully.

_Might fuck something else up. You’re taking all the stupid with you. Bucky’s alive._

He goes to bed every night with those words in his head. Tries to follow along with the unfamiliar words that the priest says every Sunday because Mrs. Carter can’t have her new son-in-law “Grant who took my daughter’s last name” not show his face in the small, rural English village. It’s 1971, in a small English village and he had a wedding in a small, unfamiliar _church_.

Sarah Rogers would have hung her head.

Peggy comes back the night of their honeymoon to tell him, “I’ve got the papers. You are now officially Grant Carter. Steve—are you sure about this? Your survival, it’s a miracle. The cells in your body, think of all the medicine! Think of the lives the serum can change.”

Steve smiles softly and runs his fingers through her hair, the silver glint of the wedding ring tangling in the curls. “I have.” He shakes his head. “It’s too dangerous. Just—Trust me.”

“My kids want to meet you.” she says, afterwards, when they’re lying on silk sheets, naked skin pressed sweat-sticky to the fabric, and he feels as if he’s floating. Like he’s living in a dream and the last thirty-odd years of his life were just some weird film made by hacks like Zack Synder with too much mass destruction and not enough love.

But it’s not. “I’d love to meet them, too.” he tells her. Two kids. One girl. One boy. Both in college. Jacob steps on a landmine in the ’91. He dies without children. Stephanie lives till the snap. He’d talked to her briefly at the funeral. She reflects all the signs of a business woman whose father died too young, killed on a mission a couple years before her ninth birthday, and none of the signs of having any time for a life outside of work.

She hadn’t said much to him.

He dyes his hair, brown this time, and grows out some stubble, the day before they step on the plane heading for JFK. It’s commercial, because he’s not S.H.I.E.L.D. and never will be. He can’t help but think that—

If he saw the _files_ , if he found the _bunker_ , if he saw Zola he would punch him right into his smug, Nazi face until he was nothing but blood and brain matter. Steve still remembers the vile taste of the words “Hail Hydra” on his tongue. How he’s wanted to throw Brock Rumlow out a window right then and there, in 2012, and watch him impact the concrete, massacred streets of Manhattan below.

 _You’re taking all the stupid with you_.

 

 

 

He spends months at a time where he doesn’t sleep at night. Friday nights outside schuls he’s never stepped foot into and remembers the taste of sweet, vinegar wine on his tongue. Remembers the smell of candles and two small boys in a drafty Brooklyn apartment playing dreidel with three small girls.

He reads about Abigail Barnes’ death in the newspaper, a blurb on a back page. _Deceased War Hero’s Sister Dies of Cancer_.

He doesn’t make his way up the parkway to attend the funeral. He _can’t_.

That night he dreams of missing arms, blood in snow, and screaming. He dreams of little ballerina girls dancing on broken toes in a cold, hidden place somewhere in Russia, dreams of the shield he’s given up. Dreams of the sweet life that Tony’d found.

Sometimes, it’s enough.

Sometimes it’s hard. Hard to stay away from Bucky’s sisters. Hard not to tell them their brother is alive. They’ve moved on. He’s _moved on_.

He buys a plane ticket to Moscow, drives to Newark Airport, and sits in the terminal until it’s time to board. The flight attendant announces final call. His hands shake, his body shakes, and he pictures them falling to dust before his eyes.

 _I can_ —he’d said, but Bucky’d looked at him with those tired, too aware eyes.

_You can leave me there to rot and burn and die and kill and become a shadow of my former self. I’ll manage. One day I’ll be found. One_

_Damn_

_Day._

 

 

 

Peggy’s got a house on the outskirts of Lakewood, N.J. There’s an Orthodox schul nearby, but Steve’s never been. She doesn’t go to any of the churches, now that her mother’s not there to make them “save face”. They are a regular, down-to-earth American couple. He’s not a former Avenger, he’s not a living legend. He’s a house husband with agoraphobia who never comes out to meet her work colleagues. Peggy thinks it’s something to do with the ice. He sees her sometimes, watching him with pain in her beautiful eyes. She thinks he’s _damaged_.

The place is close enough to Camp Lehigh, about three exits or so, and Steve imagines Bucky’s complaining that “Fuck Jersey. It can’t claim you. You are one-hundred percent Brooklyn born, and don’t you forget that.”  Peggy brings home a stack of files in 1978 and slides it across the table. She’s wearing a red dress, form fitting and bunched just under her waist as she sits, legs crossed, one knee bent over the other.

“Alexander Pierce,” she says with a nod and he feels something dark slither out of his belly and into his throat. “New recruit. He’s good. Top marks in the military. I think he’ll go far.”

“Far into the fucking grave,” Steve wants to shout. He clears his throat. “Maybe.”

She gives him a searching look and reaches across the table to grab his hand. Her hair is streaked with gray. So is his. Funny, he hadn’t thought he would age, and wonders if it’s the soul stones. He’d thought—well he’d thought maybe, sometimes, that he wouldn’t age at all. That he’d pop back up to 2023 and Bucky and Sam would be there, waiting.

 _You came back, you stupid fuck_.

 _Told you I would_.

But he hadn’t.

He goes there that night with a gun in a car that he drove their beagle to the vet in that morning. Waits, stands outside all night, and thinks about how easy it would be to shoot Alexander Pierce in the face.

 

 

 

He has a few more incidents like this. The first time Peggy comes back shaken to her core and rattling on about a mysterious, masked man with a metal arm. He’d gotten the jump on an agent in France. Peggy had been watching from the window.

“He looked so— _familiar_.”

Steve drives up to a cabin for two weeks, grows out a beard, and chops wood until his arms burn and damn near fall off.

 

 

 

The cabin becomes the home away from home. Peggy puts Bucky’s name on a Wall of Heroes in 1981. He can’t attend. Captain America, Steve Rogers who is now Grant Carter, _needs to_ _come back in 2011_. Natasha is born. Clint is born. Sam is born. Steve sleeps for five hours a night. Then four. Then three.

 

 

 

In 1991, two days before Rosh Hashanah, he asks Peggy to take a sabbatical. “I want to travel,” he tells her, because he knows he needs to be _anywhere but here_. “Just you and me. But—not the Grand Canyon.”

She frowns, confused, and tells him, “There’s a lot of work to be done. Howard—”

 “Please,” he says, and grabs her hand. “Let’s dance our way across Europe.”

There must be something in his face, but she nods. “Alright,” she tells him with a smile. “Let’s do it.”

They see the Statue of David, the baths in Budapest, and dance across the canals in Venice, before they get the news. They fly out to the funeral the next day, and Steve stays in the Hilton room Peggy’s booked across Los Angeles.

Steve’s legs shake, he crosses the room once, then twice, then three times.

_He could still be here._

When she comes back that night, face pale and eyes red-rimmed, he holds her tight as she falls apart. She’s so strong, much stronger than him, but this loss is something deep and raw.

“I didn’t think he’d die that way,” she tells him, her voice muffled from where it’s pressed against his chest. He strokes shaking fingers up and down her back. “A car crash. How absurd.”

She titters a small, mournful laugh and Steve nods. She’s gotten used to his quiet. She doesn’t say anything.

 

 

In 2004, she tells him about a red-haired Russian girl brought in by a new agent of theirs. “He found her in Budapest,” she says as she sips a cup of chamomile tea. “Fury think’s she’s got something special about her.”

Steve nods, and smiles in remembrance. Lame jokes, red hair constantly changing. The loss in Clint’s eyes, the loss in his own. “She does.”

 

 

It’s 2016. Peggy’s gone. He’d attended the funeral once, couldn’t again. Stephanie doesn’t say anything to him when she drives him to the freshly dug grave. She leaves him there. They’ve never been close. Steve wonders if she resents him taking the place of Daniel Sousa, or whether it’s been because he’s never made much of an effort. Too conscious of Bruce’s words. _Don’t change anything_.

 _He’d already changed too much_.

He picks up a stone and places it on the headstone. He can’t remember the words to the _kaddish_. He’s said them before, after the dusting. For Bucky. It’s been so long now. He feels numb and broken and horrid all at once. He’d watched the damage done. Seen the dementia take her mind. In 2011, he’d stopped going to the nursing home regularly. Couldn’t risk running into himself. It had been hard, and Stephanie hadn’t understood.

She’d called him a _useless fuck of a husband. Don’t understand why my mother loved you so much_.  

 In the background, he can hear the commotion.

The news has broke.

 _Bucky_ , he thinks, and swallows past the lump in his throat.

           

 

The lake is just as beautiful as it was that morning. It’s that morning again. Steve arrives a half hour before dawn, before the sun rose. There’s a man skipping rocks on the shore, brown hair a shadow in the slowly receding dark. Steve freezes.

“Did you have a good life?” Bucky asks without turning around.

“You knew?” Steve says and he wants to go over, to hug him one more time. He doesn’t. The shield he’s carrying for Sam rests heavy in his arms, for the first time ever.

Bucky turns to look at him with tired, blue eyes. There’s a sad, small smile on his face. “Yeah,” he says. “You got old.” There’s a hint of surprise in his eyes.

Steve laughs out a sob. “Didn’t expect to.”

Bucky nods. There’s a lot of words he’s not saying, and Steve wants him to yell. Wants him to scream, to demand why, to _blame him for leaving him there all that time_. He doesn’t.  

“I love you, you know that, right?” Steve asks instead. Bucky looks away, then nods.

“You should hide,” Bucky says, and steps forward, his metal arm outstretched. Steve grabs it, and then the flesh arm, and tries to pull him close, but Bucky’s heels are dug into the dirt. He’s so close, and he’s so far.

He’s alive. In the distance, Steve hears himself call, “Bucky? Bucky, you out here?”

 Bucky nods, “Yeah, Steve, I’m here.”

In the last few seconds before 2023 Steve, the first 2023 Steve makes his way to the shore, Bucky runs his fingers across the wedding ring. “I’m happy you had a good life.”

 Steve, as he’s done for the last fifty-three years since returning the Tesseract, backs away, and watches as his best friend continues to skip stones.

**Author's Note:**

> I really love Steve/Peggy and I want to be happy that Steve got to be with her, but it's just so hard to believe he'd let HYDRA be and let Bucky be used like that. Like, I know he couldn't change the timeline, but it's still hard to believe for me. Also, that car was totally 1940s but the Tesseract needed to be placed back in the time he took it from in 1970 so WTF? 
> 
> This work is not beta'd. It's rough cause its just feelings. Outside of this which I have mixed feelings about and a few other things, I loved the movie.


End file.
